¿De qué casa eres?/ Where do you call home?, by CHAIA – University of Évora / IN2PAST researcher and artist Ana Pérez-Quiroga, premieres on Saturday, May 10^th, at the IndieLisboa International Film Festival, in Cinema São Jorge, Lisbon, in a screening with Q&A with the director.

The film tells the story of Angelita Perez, who lived in Russian boarding schools from ages 4 to 24 until completing her medical studies. Where do you call home?/¿De qué casa eres? (Portugal, 2024, 73′) was the question faced by nearly 3,000 Spanish children exiled in the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War.

‘Looking at today’s world with wars on our doorstep, dictators emerging at every corner, and an attempted culture of silence promoting individualism, this seems to be the film that saves us’, writes Miguel Valverde, IndieLisboa co-director and programmer.

The narrative is built on the memories of the filmmaker’s 92-year-old mother, a collection of surviving objects, songs in Russian, and a journey through the lands of Ukraine and Kazakhstan to Siberia and then Moscow. A 20-year journey that culminates in a return to an unfamiliar place, to relatives with whom she has lost ties and to building a new life, adds Valverde, pointing out the film is also about the daughter, ‘who looks at this life as if it were a map that had to be built from Guernica, the objects are rehabilitated and used, transformed, the photographs come to life through the stories.’

Ana Pérez-Quiroga showed us a bit of this story, then in the editing stage, in the beginning of February last year, at the fourth IN2PAST PhD Talk, in Lisbon, named ‘Everyday objects: historical memory, post-memory and artistic intervention. The children of the Spanish Civil War who took refuge in the USSR’.

Watch the trailer here.